Has anyone mentioned yet what we US consumers play as a role buying up all of Chinas shit...something tells me China dont want NK fuking wit us so we have more money to buy their planned obsolescence...
They don't want them fucking with us because the NK/American war is a "proxy" war where Nk is the proxy of China.
NK shares a border with China and they don't want violence spilling over it either.
Plainly put, NK is a buffer between America and China and the Chinese have no intention of seeing it removed. China cannot endure a war with America right now. They have nukes, but they've only just recently started to ramp up their military spending. They've got at least 30 years of heavy spending before they can go toe to toe with us militarily, and they've got about 20-30 years before they can afford to spend that much
without us buying their stuff.
All of this shit is and always has been about endgame. Governments don't think on the 1-2-10 year scale, and they shouldn't.
Right now all the military spending we do seems like waste, but the reality is it's our only advantage in the endgame. We've got a relatively small and spread out population, we need big guns for insurance. China needs our money for theirs. Their endgame is to bring their economy to a tipping point to where they don't need us anymore (without crazy military spending on their part this is predicted to be about 50 or so years from now).
At that point they can stop relying on us so much, and they can start to spend crazy money on their own military advancement. From that point they will have a huge advantage over us due to the sheer number of people they have, and their proximity to most of the worlds natural resources.
Our endgame is very simply to spend our pants off on defense and hope its enough to stem the tide when the Chinese get ready to take over (ie when they get ready to take the stick from us).
The question isn't so much if this will all come to pass, but when. Maybe 75 years, maybe 100, maybe 200--and maybe we hold on to our advantage simply by innovating our way out and growing our population.
I really really doubt it though. This whole thing is a big fucked up game of chess and the stakes have been mostly drawn at this point. The lines are in the sand.
When the Korean war happened we were on more equal footing with China. They were not as fearful of us as they are now. No one wants a thermonuclear war, and China is pressuring NK to see that one doesn't break out--because if America starts carpet bombing NK China might not be left with much of a choice.